I’m not sure how long ago “not that long ago” is for you - I just had a look through the history of KDE and, based on my familiarity with the various screen images posted there, I think is about 20 years since I last tried it :-)

I’ll have a look at cinnamon and cosmic - thanks.

I’ve thought about trying a tiling window manager, but I don’t think I’d get the benefit. I don’t really do a lot these days and normally just have one or two things going concurrently and with two screens that’s trivial to layout.

The main thing I struggle with (with my old eyes) is things like Firefox that override the normal window manager decorations - I find the edges get lost and they blend into each other. A tiling window manager would help with this, but I just turned off Firefox’s ability to do that.

Oh damn what were your reasons for moving from freebsd back to Linux?

My work was AIX, HP/UX and a bit of Solaris. Linux development was starting to get to the stage where our customers were looking at using it for “real” workloads and I figured I should get comfortable with it again so I’d be in a position to take on production servers at work.

I don’t think I’m concerned about being on older (stable) stuff - I really only use Firefox (I dumped the Debian release and added the Firefox repository) and a few utilities like a music player etc.

I was also considering openSUSE Tumbleweed and didn’t really decide not to do it - it’s just that a USB with Debian was sitting on my desk when I decided to do it, so that’s what I used. A big part of my anxiety about switching from Windows was getting my data under control - now that I’ve done that it won’t be an issue to switch distros so I might give it a go. I may even try Slackware again now that you’ve got me thinking about it.

I thought about that, and we have space available because my wife is still paying for office for her machine, but I just want nothing to do with Microsoft any more.

Because I only used it for a few months and it was a while ago! It was ony mentioned to age me. Not long after I installed it we got nice new RS/6000 860 laptops and I ran an AIX desktop for a couple of years. Then we got Intel laptops and Windows.

I went with Debian because I’ve been running Ubuntu servers at home for years (since zfs on Linux became solid enough that I could switch from FreeBSD) so I’m comfortable with apt package management and wanted to stick with that. I didn’t want to stay with Ubuntu because of the commercialisation creeping in.

Don’t remove cron

Oops, too late. It’s just a very simple single purpose system - I can deal with broken things and removing cron on this box is kinda a test to see what breaks. I checked the apt cron jobs and they also seemed to be duplicated as systemd timers - but it wasn’t a very thorough check. My logs show apt-daily.service being run daily by systemd.

This thread is my first introduction to mesh and am curious if it might be worth investigating further. I looked at the map above and see that my nearest “neighbour” is about 900km away, then I see your post where you seem happy that you got 60 miles. I guess things would be quite for me for a looong time if I built a node.

what gets removed along with cron when you try?

# apt-get --dry-run purge cron cron-daemon-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cron* cron-daemon-common*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Purg cron [3.0pl1-162]
Purg cron-daemon-common [3.0pl1-162]

nothing!